Interpreting the Chemical Variability of Iron Smelting Slag: A Case Study from Northeastern Madagascar
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
For the metallurgist, the information presented in the Article is a history of smelting iron in smoke boxes (simple metallurgical furnaces). Considering the primitivism of that period, it is difficult to expect stable control of the process. This method of smelting has already been described in detail. From the point of view of archaeological mineralogy, it may be an interesting text. The location of the furnaces presented in Figure 1 is typical - large water resources and charcoal (fuel) and the availability of iron ore. The Authors took samples from old furnaces and subjected them to geochemical, mineralogical and petrographic studies. For this purpose, They used chemical mass analyzes by X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) methods. They presented a material balance of the process based on the law of conservation of mass described substrates = products with relative amounts of the respective components.
Detailed comments:
Fig. 2 is Charcoa should be Charcoal
Fig. 5 is Al2O3 should be Al2O3
line 134 - 3.3. The Smelting Slags; this is not a section on slag smelting, here are smelted slag data
lines 408 -420 Reference is made to figure 7; individual elements described as a, b…, f; in Figure 7 these elements are not marked
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Following the comments of Reviewer 2, several improvements have been done, especially about including more references.
Detailed comments:
Fig. 2 : The figure on Word was slightly distorted and has been improved to become more readable.
Fig. 5: This is also a problem when copying the figure to Word. Improvements have been done.
Line 134 – 3.3: The generally accepted terms to describe slag from the iron ore reduction process is “smelting slag” to describe the slag coming from a smelting process (e.g. Rehren et al., 2007). The purpose of this section is to describe the results on the smelting slag, in the same way as the previous sections describe the results on the iron ore and on the sandy substratum.
Lines 408-420: The elements mentioned in the text have been added to the figure 7.
Reviewer 2 Report
Please see the PDF file for comments and suggestions.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you for your comments, it was very helpful. Please find attached the response.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors!
Thank you very much for taking notice of my comments and suggestions.
I appreciate that you added further references to other publications on the topic.
I also thank you for some clarifications and explanations that helped me to better get your points.
I still think that further discussion on values and conclusions from similar studies would improve the paper.
Nevertheless, your argument that most of the data in the literature would require to develop a procedure of standardizing the data to make it comparable is reasonable. And yes, data are scattered and many publications on slag composition are difficult to access. I think your main arguments are clear without this discussion that is nice to have but not essential.
Best regards,
